“It came to him at unexpected times, an internal rambling that he alone could hear. Alarmed, he confided to his mother that the voice “felt like two people inside of me.” As he got older, the voice became more authoritative, its bidding more insistent. Tamerlanconfided in a close friend that the voice had begun to issue orders and to require him to perform certain acts, though he never told his friend specifically what those acts were. “He was torn between those two people,” said Donald Larking, 67, who attended the mosque with Tamerlan for nearly two years. “He said that several times. And he did not like it.”

“…As their relationship grew closer, Tamerlan confided in Larking his troubling secret about the voice inside his head. Tamerlan told him that he had been hearing the voice for some time, and that he had a theory of what might be afflicting him. “He believed in majestic mind control, which is a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist,” explained Larking. “You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things. Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him. The person inside him, as Tamerlan described it to Larking, “was someone who wanted tocontrol him to make him do something.” The last time Larking and Tamerlan sat together in the rear of the mosque, Tamerlan once again mentioned the voices in his head. This time, as Larking recalled it, he seemed afraid. “He said, ‘Someone is in my brain, telling me stuff to do,’ ” recalled Larking. “He said he was trying to ignore it but it was hard to do. Whatever it was he was being told to do, he didn’t want to do it.”